Conan O’Brien left late-night television behind five years ago. Somehow, it keeps finding him.
Speaking Wednesday evening at Bloomberg Screentime, the two-day media and entertainment conference in Los Angeles, O’Brien described how his podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, has gradually picked up some of the very trappings of the TV format he spent nearly three decades hosting.
It started when SiriusXM suggested he do some podcasts in front of an audience. Those went well, so they moved to a theater. Then someone suggested adding “some shtick” to fill out the show, so O’Brien brought in writers. Music followed.
“And one day I’m doing it there and I’m like, ‘All right, we’ll take a break. We’ll be right back,’” O’Brien recalled.
That was when it hit him.
“There’s a giant organism in the universe that demands that this is what it is,” he said.
O’Brien stressed that his team has “mostly avoided” turning the podcast into a full-fledged late-night show, but the experience speaks to a broader tension he sees in podcasting as the format matures.
Part of what originally appealed to O’Brien about podcasts was the freedom they offered from the rigid structure of television talk shows. After years of conducting six- or seven-minute interviews while watching for a wrap sign, he suddenly had the ability to sit with someone for an hour or more.
But increasingly, he said, podcasts are becoming part of the same publicity machine that once governed those late-night bookings.
O’Brien said he recently discussed the phenomenon with Kareem Rahma, the host of SubwayTakes, asking whether he had experienced what O’Brien called becoming “the victim of your success.”
“It’s when you start out doing this thing where you’re just going to talk to the artist, and it’s very pure,” O’Brien explained. But as a show becomes more successful, he said, appearances begin arriving with requirements attached: an episode needs to drop at a certain time to coincide with a project, and there may be subjects a guest will or won’t discuss.
“You start to see it calcified because that’s what happens to things,” he said.
O’Brien said he and his team have pushed back against that tendency, and argued that the podcast format continues to allow him to have some of the best interviews of his career.
He pointed to recent conversations with Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Paul McCartney, and Mick Jagger, noting that there is no pre-interview and no live audience putting pressure on guests to perform.
“If you connect with them in the moment and lock eyes with them, you never know what they’re going to say,” he said.
O’Brien said that at this point in his career, he prefers that looser environment to traditional late night.
“I was very fortunate to have that format when that format was the thing to have, and I did it for a long time and I loved it,” he said. “But now at this stage in my life and my career, having these kinds of conversations with people and not obsessing about what I’m wearing, not having makeup on—it just feels like this is an appropriate place to be.”
How long that place will remain SiriusXM is another question.
Th company acquired O’Brien’s Team Coco in 2022 as part of a deal that included a five-year talent agreement running through 2027. Asked Wednesday whether he planned to renew, O’Brien wasn’t ready to commit.
“I haven’t even thought about it yet,” he said, joking that 2027 felt so distant that “it’s like 2023 right now.”
“We’ll get to that when the time comes,” he added, “but I assure you all will be well.”
Earlier in the conversation, O’Brien joked that his ideal arrangement would be “to have all the IP back, but keep the money they gave me upfront and then have a lot more money than that.”
I’m a big Conan fan, but he’s just as guilty as any podcaster of falling into the “promotion machine” for everyone’s latest film, book, or streaming series. Maybe he believes he has to play the game in order to stay profitable enough to employ his staff, which is noble. But I can’t help but feel like he has enough money to do less promo interviews with Hollywood A- and B-listers and more interesting interviews with young comedians, personalities outside the entertainment industry, etc.
The “staff” being your code for his whole venture named Team Coco? And no, if we are talking specifically non-paywalled audiovisual productions on what-I-call ‘pop-Interwebs’, this Hollywoodian guy offers no independently fresh insight of his own because he’s already part of the Machine. This is not some appeal to the allures of populism or something (which is something you’ve already done so me doing the same would be very “comments section”-esque, more on that below), because if you read my own insight into the cultural bubble/sphere of the one and only online-native entertainment personality he could name, I elaborate how hyper-partisanship amongst the immeasurable audiences is incredibly turning out to be a far bigger and potentially dangerous challenge even for the so-called “content creators” (a descriptor which I would rather be judicious about) than his overarching theory of the good ol’ corporatisation, which is timeless and not that big of a deal — relatively speaking. It might be uncomfortable reading for you PRECISELY because you’re already exhibiting such symptoms on which I’ve offered critical outlook.
That’s because it’s sorry for allowing that weaselly chin chimp, Jay Leno, to blindside him to usurp the Tonight Show gig, then handing it off to that Fuckface Fallon, shortly after!
Ouch! Very strong (ahem!) “Takes”.
If he’s mentioned the name of Mr Kareem Rahma of “Takes with Kareem Rahma” franchise & more, then it’s almost certain that this highest-profile icon of travesty dubbed “Irish-Americans” certainly talked about him not like outside professional setting or privately as he makes it sound and revealing it out of very non-showbiz style altruistic courtesy, but exactly the kind of “tease” for the most-likely long-form interview in that new-age chat/talk show’s franchise’s long-form, “Uncut” spinoff which its freeloading, reels-scrolling brained most vocal audiences keep bitching, moaning and whining quite viciously about guests like him because it’s “internet” so the misplaced notion that fans/stans materially drive an masscomm IP’s success and therefore, “audience interpretation” is somehow equivalent to or even surpasses “artistic/creative intent” intent because “once you put your art/work out there, it doesn’t belong to you” or somesuch legally-untenable esoteric romanticism: Is why they get to be intellectually challenged and insist that the show’s format is exactly not what it is told to be but in fact must cater/pander to their own whims-&-fancies, or simply put, imagination of what they thought it is supposed to be — to the extent that there would be even good ol’, Roy Cohn-BFFing Newhouse family’s factory drones dubbed redditors style falsehoods instead of just very strong opinions emblematic of Mandela Effect if exceedingly charitable to assume good-faith on part of reckless rumour-mongers — all in service of the mass hysteria-style of dictating every aspect of productions by your parasocial public figures blood-&-sweat delivered without any subscription or direct fee to them. So, he’s obviously being one of those who coddle the whole fandom/standom sub-culture for PR pros but the challenges in the digital media or as previously said, new-age developments of the format are not just the good ol’ challenges faced by corporate Powers, but very directly a hyper-polarised, un-filtered and highly cocksure audiences whom you don’t even have the luxury to tune out anymore even though if arts matter, you’re already doing them a public service of sorts by delivering to you the kind of content that they used to pay for. And ultimately, be more liable on average to millions of strangers than say, even a public office-holder practically has to be. And in the day-&-age of increasingly normalised political violence, those already not privileged by the Hollywoodian bubble/shield like the Team Coco’s mascot but only at the periphery of it Thanks to the democratization into a place as inherently classist and hierarchical as showbiz wrought forward by the technological advancements of the information age, the downside of said democratisation which is unfettered audience access — is getting real ugly, real fast.